Pac-12 Expansion: All Quiet On The Western Front

It seems like just about every school in the nation has switched conferences sometime in the last few years. The Pac-12 added Colorado and Utah about 18 months ago, and every program involved has already felt the competitive and financial impact due to a new scheduling format and a lucrative media deal.

As Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said on Friday, he does not expect the conference to expand anytime soon. At the same time though, Scott also said he has learned to “never say never”, and that expansion talks could pick up at a future date.

New Hawai’i chancellor Tom Apple, whose school hasn’t even arrived in the Mountain West yet:

↵↵He wasn’t alluding to the WAC, of course, as it’s sadly headed south toward the Pacific trash island. (I actually kind of like Hawai’i to the Pac-12, via Larry Scott’s eye toward Asia, but it’s probably not gonna happen.)

With college football playoff details coming later this summer, likely by early July, we know conference realignment moves are on hold for the time being. Once the 2014 playoff system comes out, the free-for-all is back on, with the renewed possibility of Notre Dame easing into the Big 12 as its NBC deal runs out, upping the stakes even more.

We have a good sense of the general moves still on the board, but if we really are entering the long-prophesied, 64-team reign of the superconference, we might as well start war-gaming. Below, an attempt at the best shape each conference could be in following the next wave, along with the worst that could happen.

Is there an end in sight to college conference realignment? There is not. Of course there isn’t! There are certain milestones just down the road, however, which we can use to help figure out how extensively to stock the bunkers.

Two of them, as Spencer Hall and I discuss in the video below after an exhausting filming of this Friday’s Shutdown Fullback, are this summer’s revelation of college football’s 2014 playoff plan and the point in 2015 at which Notre Dame’s NBC contract expires. If the Irish don’t already have a conference by then (and they could have one by, like, tomorrow), everything could completely change all over again. To the SEC they probably don’t go!

We talk about conference realignment a lot. Pretty much every day. It’s become the third sport of college football, right after recruiting. But how do we figure out who’s winning it?

Here’s an attempt at assigning a Realignment Value to every school in or close to joining FBS, so we can figure out exactly which conferences are winning (and by how much) and how big the remaining moves are.

Conference realignment! It never ends, but it does offer up waypoints that have even the most diligent college fans losing track of which schools are going where. Thus, with the Mountain West, Sun Belt and Conference USA all making finalized (or reported) moves this week, it’s a fine time to catch up on adjustments both pending and possible, from the independents to the power leagues.

First up, the WAC. Alphabetical order after that. It’s the smallest courtesy we can extend a conference on life support. With only two football schools left for 2013, the WAC’s only FBS option is to convince a slew of FCS schools to take the double risk of jumping up a level and joining the Mountain West’s trough.

Temple has returned to the Big East, and college sports have been solved. Every Division I conference is now set, and no more teams will move around for the sake of making more money or for any other reason that’s actually just more money. Let’s assess where we stand while the smoke clears. You’d be amazed how much smoke the MAC and Big East can kick up over Temple football!

Ranked in order from most settled to least settled, here’s the realignment state of each conference:

There was a time when conferences were born simply out of geography and necessity. Travel was relatively difficult, and you needed teams to play. So Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma formed a conference, as did most of the teams on the West Coast. In 1938, here is how major college football conferences took shape:

Power and money certainly had a part to play, of course, even 70 years ago. Sewanee and Chicago were not long for the world of major conference football, nor were quality independents like Fordham and St. Mary’s. And half of the Southern Conference was already playing something far from a big-time version of the sport. The Southwest Conference would eventually pull in Texas Tech, and the Big 6 would become the Big 8 after adding Colorado and Oklahoma State. The Pac-8 would eventually become the Pac-10 by adding the Arizona schools not named Northern Arizona (sorry, Lumberjacks). But general geographic ties held; and they held long enough that, for fans over a certain age, a fraying of geography in their conference ties is still rather unfathomable. (Of course, it doesn’t take a stodgy old person to find his or her mind blown by San Diego State getting ready to move to a conference called the “Big East.”)

When we talk about conference realignment, we often get sidetracked talking about money, markets, television sets and, on rare occasion, academics. If Rutgers is ever a draw to the Big Ten, it’s because of “the New York market,” not anything Greg Schiano has (or hasn’t) accomplished. Missouri is a draw for the SEC as much (or more) because of Kansas City and St. Louis than their general Top 25 level of play on the field. West Virginia would be strong in many ways for the SEC, but that West Virginia market?

Yawn. As we continue to follow the latest on what unnamed sources are saying and catty university presidents are doing behind closed board room doors, let’s take a look at the impact recent goings-on will have on the football field itself. Novel concept, eh?

↵VUGymRat has taken all this messy college conference back-and-forth and made it all so visually-appealing.

↵Plus, now you realize that realignment isn’t all that new after all.

And if you believe that, Texas has some late-night ad space on the Longhorn Network they’d like to sell you.

Tired of reading interview after interview of university presidents and ADs touting the financial gains of conference realignment, NCAA President Mark Emmert is on the offensive to remind you that conference realignment isn’t about the money. It’s about love of the game...or some PR nonsense like that.

As soon as the Pac-12 voted not to expand, thereby eliminating the option of adding schools like Oklahoma to the mix, the Sooners went on the offensive with the fantastic spin tactic, “We wanted to stay in the Big 12 anyway.“

Turns out that might not have been exactly true after all.

Now that the notion of Pac-12 expansion is dead, at least for the moment, Commissioner Larry Scott is talking about the end of the potential mega-deal that could have brought Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and perhaps Texas and Texas Tech to the westernmost BCS conference. Among the new details: Scott actually began telling Pac-12 presidents that he didn’t think they should make the deal on Monday, the same day that Texas and Oklahoma’s boards authorized their presidents to explore other conferences.

So what caused the deal to go under? Scott doesn’t say exactly, but the commish vaguely gestures in the direction of the Longhorn Network, long thought to be the main barrier to landing Texas.

↵“We’ve talked about a lot of ideas.“ Yep.

The Oklahoma Sooners have earned a lifetime supply of pfffffffffffts for this one:

↵

At about 5:00 p.m. CT yesterday, I tweeted this in regard to the news of Oklahoma’s list of “demands” for staying in the Big 12 (“Fire Dan Beebe,” etc.) and the assumption by some that if they’re willing to stay in the Big 12, they must have been turned away by the Pac-12:

At 6:00 p.m. CT last night, I started jotting down a structure for a “Why Mizzou?” column in today’s Tailgate space. The “Mizzou has an agreement to move to the SEC as soon as the Big 12 falls apart” narrative had taken hold.

And according to Tramel’s source, the replacement of current commissioner Dan Beebe with “an interim commissioner” would be one of the “major, major reforms” required to keep the Sooners from leaving. Whoa.

Beebe has been perhaps the BCS’ most unpopular conference commissioner, at least until CBS Sports scooped Big East commissioner John Marinatto on the exit of two Big East teams. Oklahoma has reason to give the Big 12 a shot at keeping established rivalries intact, but that’s quite a line in the sand they’re drawing if this report is accurate.

From when my parents graduated college to when I entered high school, David Boren was an omnipresent politician in my state of then-residence. He served four years as Governor of Oklahoma, then 16 years as U.S. Senator. He was the type of Democrat who can get elected in Oklahoma, an old-school centrist who is useful in a healthy, bipartisan environment but only symbolic and somewhat damaging to his own party in today’s political climate.

Boren escaped politics to become president of the University of Oklahoma in the 1990s. He is still as self-important as only a two-decade politician could be, but that has served him and his university rather well. And his words still carry heft. My first two reactions when he spoke up about Oklahoma’s role in conference realignment a couple of weeks ago: 1) “Man, does that guy still enjoy hearing himself speak,” and 2) “Wow, so Oklahoma really might be about to leave the Big 12.” Boren would never have spoken up unless change was imminent in his (and his regents’) eyes.

Now that the Oklahoma Board of Regents has given its President the go-ahead to talk with the Pac-12, the Texas Board of Regents has gone ahead and done the same thing.

Texas Longhorns President Bill Powers now has the official authority to take “any necessary actions” regarding conference realignment. Ultimately, any change in UT’s conference affiliation would be to be approved by the Board of Regents as well.

Monday, the University of Oklahoma’s board of regents granted school president David Boren authority to take action regarding conference realignment.

The rumored expansion of the Pac-12 includes Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas and Texas Tech, though much of that depends on Oklahoma and Texas’ ultimate interest in doing so.

By now, you’re sick of hearing about conferences adding schools for the sake of picking up big TV markets. But if you’d like a better sense of what that means, you should read Nate Silver’s Monday afternoon conference realignment piece. It has charts.

↵As Silver notes several times, it’s not a perfect look at how much each market and school means in the big picture. However, charts are fun.

The Texaswide Leader would need to “be folded into the Pac-12 regional model,” Wilner reports, making it more of a Texas-centric Pac-12 outlet than, well, a Longhorn Network. But from the sounds of it, being an equal partner of the Pac-12 could make Texas more money than the LHN would anyway.

Media outlets from Texas are reporting the deal is almost done, while media outlets from the coast are reporting it isn’t. You could presume the real answer is somewhere in between, if you wanted.

Those three entities in the title are listed in descending order of importance in this matter, of course.

While the Irish remain a football independent, it would be hard to imagine them choosing to leave their basketball in a dilapidated conference with few other nationally branded institutions and no shot at a top media deal -- not to mention one that could soon be upstaged in its own home. Either way, Notre Dame remains the most-prized item on the market for the Big Ten, Big 12, Big East and ACC.

The most interesting piece of that report, which also brings up pod scheduling, is how the Pac-12 could handle the Longhorn Network, given the conference’s stringent revenue sharing requirements. In exchange for the Texaswide Leader having to carry Pac-12 content, there could be a built-in way for Texas to still profit from the open-market sale of its third-tier media rights. That’s the way we’re reading it, at least.

According to the report:

The Texas Board of Regents will convene on Monday, and one of the items on the agenda deals with conference alignment. As is typical in these expansion wars, Texas president Bill Powers will reportedly be given the authorization to make all decisions with regards to the Longhorns’ conference alignment going forward. And thus, the mysterious conference alignment agenda item is solved.

The report comes from Kirk Bohls.